Justice and Prosecutions

With the adoption of the Convention for the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide in 1948, genocide became a crime under international law. The convention also mandates that signatories of the convention incorporate the criminalization of genocide into their own legal code.  Although the punitive element of the convention as not invoked until the International Criminal Tribunals for Yugoslavia and Rwanda (the ICTY and ICTR, respectively) did so in the late 1990s, a considerable body of jurisprudence has developed both prior to and since then.

The development of a regime of justice related to genocide is most apparent in international law: While the ICTY and ICTR have made several convictions of genocide between them.  The International Court of Justice has made a determination that genocide did occur in Srebenica (and that the government of Serbia was legally complicit in failing to prevent Bosnian Serb militias from committing genocide despite the knowledge and means of doing so). The partially international Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia (ECCC) has brought genocide-related charges as well.  The International Criminal Court has issued a warrant for the arrest of Omar Bashir, president of Sudan, on genocide charges.

The national realm of justice ought not to be overlooked as well, though.  In several South American countries, genocide law includes “political groups” among those to be protected from intent to destroy. Other judges have considered invoking universal jurisdiction to indict individuals living outside their national realm for crimes against others outside their national realm for crimes committed outside their national realm.

Meanwhile, in countries that have experienced genocide, justice is not restricted to the use of the genocide convention.  National courts have considered both genocide and genocide-related charges (such as crimes against humanity, or simply murder, in the context of widespread mass violence) in several places.  Rwanda’s gacaca courts, created at the grassroots level, ultimately heard almost two million trials related to the 1994 genocide.